Show me three… Awesome book series’

I love to read, and I especially love a good series. I will list a few of the series I have read and enjoyed, and hopefully I will get some good reviews and suggestions on other series to add to the list.

#1

Harry Potter! What else could it be?! We’ve been loving Harry Potter in this house for over a decade. I would just love to spend a day inside J.K. Rowling’s head…her imagination is incredible.

#2

The Twilight Series. Another obvious choice. I found the first book a little “teeny bopperish” (that’s a word, right?), but the subsequent books were more substantial. They kept me wanting to know what happened next, and I wasn’t able to come to quick conclusions about the story. If only the movies would live up to the books.

#3

The Left Behind Series. This is an amazing series that is a literal translation of the Book of Revelations. It’s full of action, suspense and drama and it’s definitely thought provoking, particularly for people of Faith. With 12 books in the series, it keeps you reading for awhile. This is not appropriate for children, although I do believe they have a Left Behind Series for youth (I have not read it though).

Show me twenty Unique Wedding Gowns

My six year old daughter was given Bride Barbie for her birthday, and many wedding discussions have taken place since then. The big dusty white box that contains my wedding dress was hauled down from the closet shelf and I watched as she ooohhhhed and aaaaahhhhed over and then beamed with excitement when I said it would someday be hers. I told her she would be able to use parts of it and have it changed however she would want, but she insists she wants it “as is”. I hope not, since it fit a nice size baby bump when I wore it. It’s nice to have a little girl to share these things with, and even nicer to know that my boys won’t feel cheated when I give the dress to her (what happens to wedding gowns when there is more than one daughter in the family?). 

All of this wedding talk made my next topic an obvious choice…unique wedding gowns. 

#1

A Wedding Gown made of condoms 

This particular wedding dress was fashioned from 12,500 individually colored & hand-stitched condoms. The result was actually quite lovely & you can rest assured that on your wedding night that you’d be well-covered in that area! 

Wedding Dress made of condoms

Condom Wedding Gown

  

#2 

This dress is made entirely out of paper! Getting too close to a candle could be disastrous in this gown. 

Paper Wedding Dress

Paper Wedding Dress

  

#3 

Another paper dress….and this time it has writing on it. This Dada Poem Wedding Gown is stamped with an image of a real biological heart (a votive) amongst black letters (Dada-style, in that the varied size and boldness of the typography suggest sound), which spell out what is only implied in Hawarden’s corseted dresses: Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged Moments”. 

Dada Gown

Dada Poem Wedding Gown

  

#4This pink “sexy” gown looks more like something out of a costume catalogue. 

Pink Sexy Gown

  

#5

This LED wedding dress will ensure that the guests can always locate the bride! 

Light up dress

LED Wedding Gown

  

#6

The Hello Kitty Wedding Gown. It is pink, it has Hello Kitty on it. The title says it is a wedding gown, so I am guessing it is…but I can’t imagine what bridge would choose it. 

Hello Kitty Dress

Pink Hello Kitty Gown

  

#7

I am shocked that one isn’t enough, so here is Hello Kitty Dress number 2… 

Hello Kitty Gown

White Hello Kitty Wedding Dress

  

#8 

And Hello Kitty Dress number 3! 

Hello Kitty
Blue Hello Kitty Wedding Dress

  

#9 

The gown is hot! The flames have been airbrushed onto the gown. 

Flame Gown

Airbrushed Wedding Dress

  

#10 

The American Gown is perfect for the bridge who wants to show her allegiance to her country, or didn’t have time to buy a gown but did have a big flag out front. 

American Flag Dress 

#11 This is an incredible and most expensive Wedding Dress I have
ever seen. The Peacock wedding dress has been hand sewen from 2,009 pieces of peacock feathers. It took about eight months for 8 creators to complete this. The $1.5 million Peacock dress was unveiled at the wedding expo held in the capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province, Nanjing. Althought it might not be a good idea to buy this Peacock dress in this recession time, it is a Nice dress to keep people Glaring at it. (Image Credit)  

Peacock Gown

Peacock Wedding Gown

  

#12 I LOVE this cute little polka dot wedding dress. You can tell this wedding was all about fun and personality! Check out the designer’s website, she is awesome!

Polka dot Gown
Polka Dot Wedding Gown

  

#13Discarded to Design 

This amazing gown has been made entirely from old denim that was bleached white. 

Denim Dress
Denim Dress
Denim Dress Back

Denim Dress Back

  

#14An edible wedding dress?! 

Lukka Sigurdardottir created th 

is incredible and enormous checkered wedding dress cake. 

Cake Dress

Edible Cake Dress

  

#15Cream Puff Wedding Gown. I guess there is a whole line of edible gowns! 

Cream Puff Gown
Cream Puff Gown

  

#16This wedding gown is part of the Flower Couture by Franz Grabe

flower gown
Floral Gown

  

#17Here is another floral wedding gown. 

floral dress
Flower Wedding Dress

  

#18Now that’s a train! 

huge train
Huge train on wedding gown

  

#19Da Vinci 8220 wedding dress. There are a lot of red wedding gowns out there, but this one just struck me as unique and beautiful. 

red gown
Da Vinci Red Wedding Gown

  

#20The Goth Gown…what every goth bride needs on her day.. 

Goth Gown
Gothic Wedding Gown

  

Show me twenty BIG HOLES!

Get your minds out of the gutter! I’m talking about landscape. Click on the pictures to learn more about each picture. 

Big Hole#1 

The Big Hole, Open Mine or Kimberley Mine is an open-pit and underground mine in Kimberley, South Africa and claimed to be the largest hole excavated by hand. 

Great Blue Hole 

#2 

A blue hole is a submarine cave or sinkhole. They are also called vertical caves. There are many different Blue Holes located around the world, such as in the Bahamas and in Belize. 

Diavik Diamond Mines 

#3 

The Diavik Diamond Mine’s footprint is contained within a 20 square kilometre island in Lac de Gras. 

World's Biggest Hole 

#4 

The second largest man-made hole in the world (surpassed only by the Bingham Copper Mine in Utah) is a diamond mine located on the outskirts of Mirny, a small town in eastern Siberia. Begun in 1955, the pit is now 525 meters deep and 1.25 kilometers across. 

Darvaza#5 

The Derweze area is rich in natural gas. While drilling in 1971 geologists accidentally found an underground cavern filled with natural gas.[1] The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a large hole with a diameter of about 50-100 meters. To avoid poisonous gas discharge, it was decided to burn the gas.[2] Geologists had hoped the fire would go out in a few days but it has been burning ever since. Locals have named the cavern The Door to Hell

Russian Rainforest#6 

From the end of 1980s a strange phenomena is happening in some Russian forests. People find strange, deep holes. They appear in the dense forest, in the places you can’t get on the car or truck to bring any device to drill the ground. There is no any soil that should be taken from such deep holes is found. 

Devil's Sinkhole#7 

The name, Devil’s Sinkhole, aptly connotes the dark depths and other-worldliness of a vast vertical chasm in the limestone bedrock on the far western reaches of the Edwards Plateau. Given it’s unique qualities, the site was undoubtedly considered a sacred place by native peoples. 

Monticello Dam#8 

Monticello Dam is a dam in Napa County, California, United States constructed between 1953 and 1957. It is a medium concrete-arch dam with a structural height of 304 ft (93 m) and a crest length of 1,023 ft (312 m). It contains 326,000 cubic yards (249,000 m³) of concrete. 

Guatamala Sinkhole#9 

In February 2007 a large sinkhole opened in a poor neighborhood in northeast Guatemala city, killing three people. The sinkhole was 100.5 m (330 ft) deep, and apparently was created by fluid from a sewer dissolving the rock underneath. As a result, one thousand people have been evacuated from the area. The sink hole has since been mitigated and plans to develop on the site have been proposed. 

Jaua Sarisariama National Park#10 

These holes are the oldest and largest caverns in the world, dating from the Precambrian period and feature 350 m in diameter and depth. 

Deep water quarry hotel#11 

Atkins has won an international design competition to design a five-star resort hotel set within a beautiful water-filled quarry in the Songjiang district close to Shanghai in China. Its stunning concept designs inspired by the natural water and landscape features of the quarry captured the imagination of judges to quash competition from two other international firms. The innovative design of the 400-bed resort hotel stands two levels higher than the rock face of the 100 metre deep quarry and includes underwater public areas and guestrooms. 

Bingham County Mine#12 

The Bingham Canyon Mine, also known as the Kennecott Copper Mine, is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. It is owned by Rio Tinto Group, an international mining and exploration company headquartered in the United Kingdom. The copper operations at Bingham Canyon Mine are managed through Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation which operates the mine, a concentrator plant, a smelter, and a refinery. The mine has been in production since 1906, and has resulted in the creation of a pit over 0.75 miles (1.2 km) deep, 2.5 miles (4 km) wide, and covering 1,900 acres (7.7 km²). According to Kennecott, it is the world’s largest man-made excavation. 

Kilbourn Hole

Kilbourn Hole

 

#13 

Kilbourne Hole is a maar volcanic crater, located 30 miles (48 km) west of the Franklin mountains of El Paso, Texas, in the Potrillo Volcanic Field of Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Nearby Hunt’s Hole lies several miles just south of Kilbourne Hole. These holes are rare examples of volcanic action without a mountainous rim. The theory of formation is that a volcanic eruption occurs in the presence of ground waters, beneath the surface of the earth. As the magma encounters the groundwater, explosive interactions occur. Country rocks are fragmented and expelled in the atmosphere (together with fragments of the magma), eventually creating a deep crater, the bottom of which sits below the pre-eruptive ground surface. The crater is thought to be 80,000 years old.
Hole in Rock
#14
On the East side of Oahu there is a large rock formation with a giant hole in it. It lies like a huge stone ship that’s been savagely torpedoed a few hundred metres off the beach.
Dwyer Hole in Coast Wall#15
The natural rock formation “Hole-in-the-Wall” near Coffee Bay on the Wild Coast.
Dark hole on Mars
#16
The “Jeanne” pit is definitely not an impact crater because the pit surroundings show no presence of an ejecta field. If this discovery is real, it is thought by some scientists to be a site where the top of some huge underground cavern formed in hard strata has collapsed and fell in leaving this hole or “skylight” in the cavern roof. I’m reminded that something that acts very much like this are what are known as “blue holes” here on Earth but these sites are usually submerged in water and their surviving cantilevered partial roofs are partially supported by that water. Obviously these pits proximity to the volcano system geology give some added support to the scientific giant hole speculation because such huge underground caverns could have been formed due to the past subterranean volcanic activity. 

Kilauea Hawaii#17 

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, established in 1916, is a United States National Park located in the U.S. State of Hawaiʻi on the island of Hawaiʻi. It displays the results of hundreds of thousands of years of volcanism, migration, and evolution—processes that thrust a bare land from the sea and clothed it with complex and unique ecosystems and a distinct Ancient Hawaiian culture. Kīlauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and Mauna Loa, the most massive, offer scientists insights on the birth of the Hawaiian Islands and visitors’ views of dramatic volcanic landscapes. In recognition of its outstanding natural values, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park has been designated as an International Biosphere Reserve in 1980 and a World Heritage Site in 1987. 

Send in your “big hole” finds to get us to 20! Keep it clean and don’t forget to include the links.